Amazon clearly knows that it is not the beauty of html behind the page that will make this initiative successful OR cause it to fail . At the end of the day, these images are used to get the message across and its Just doing that . That's what it is.. Nothing beyond it.
It's not just the behind-the-scenes stuff that's ugly. Whatever they used to render the text is much worse than what my browser does. And there's no mouse hover changes. And you can't copy/paste the text. Following best practices would have gotten them a long tail of benefits for free.
Sure, the page gets the message across, but I think even non-technical people are at least subliminally aware of the fact that there's something low-quality going on.
If some smaller website did this it wouldn't be as surprising. It's just that this seems like an amateur mistake from a company that we all assumed to have competence in web design.
Amazon is a store, not a website design luxury showcase. They aim to deliver the most products at the lowest prices with reliable delivery, and they aren't selling copy-pasteable ad copy. They rte quite competent in their web design.